The criminal justice system is complicated. Understand it and your rights. This book demystifies the complex rules and procedures of criminal law. It explains how the system works, why police, lawyers, and judges do what they do, and what suspects, defendants, and prisoners can expect. It also provides critical information on working with a lawyer. In plain English, The Criminal Law Handbook covers: search and seizure arrest, booking, and bail Miranda rights arraignment plea bargains trials sentencing common defenses working with defense attorneys constitutional rights juvenile court legal terms and definitions appeals public defenders victims’ rights The 17th edition is completely updated, covering the latest in criminal law, including U.S. Supreme Court cases.

The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law reflects the continued transformation of criminal law into a global discipline, providing scholars with a comprehensive international resource, a common point of entry into cutting edge contemporary research and a snapshot of the state and scope of the field. To this end, the Handbook takes a broad approach to its subject matter, disciplinarily, geographically, and systematically. Its contributors include current and future research leaders representing a variety of legal systems, methodologies, areas of expertise, and research agendas. The Handbook is divided into four parts: Approaches & Methods (I), Systems & Methods (II), Aspects & Issues (III), and Contexts & Comparisons (IV). Part I includes essays exploring various methodological approaches to criminal law (such as criminology, feminist studies, and history). Part II provides an overview of systems or models of criminal law, laying the foundation for further inquiry into specific conceptions of criminal law as well as for comparative analysis (such as Islamic, Marxist, and military law). Part III covers the three aspects of the penal process: the definition of norms and principles of liability (substantive criminal law), along with a less detailed treatment of the imposition of norms (criminal procedure) and the infliction of sanctions (prison law). Contributors consider the basic topics traditionally addressed in scholarship on the general and special parts of the substantive criminal law (such as jurisdiction, mens rea, justifications, and excuses). Part IV places criminal law in context, both domestically and transnationally, by exploring the contrasts between criminal law and other species of law and state power and by investigating criminal law's place in the projects of comparative law, transnational, and international law.

This title contains 17 original essays by leading thinkers in the field and covers the field's major topics including limits to criminalization, obscenity and hate speech, blackmail, the law of rape, attempts, accomplice liability, causation responsibility, justification and excuse, duress, and more.

A search only dictionary on the FindLaw web site that includes 10,000 definitions of legal terms.

"Answers your questions about every part of a criminal case. Find out everything you've ever wanted to know about how the system works and why police, lawyers, and judges do what they do."--The back cover.

Including: penal law, criminal procedure law, correction law, N.Y.C. Criminal Court Act, uniform rules for courts exercising criminal jurisdiction, related statutes, offenses and classifications for the penal law, sentencing guides by Barry Kamins, Esq.